YouTube is built by one of the most engaged communities on the web, and you tell us when you want changes. Today, you heard from Google+ about upcoming changes based on user feedback. We wanted to give you an early look at what this will mean with respect to comments on YouTube, and to your overall YouTube experience.

The headline: we think you’ll like it.

Comments
Comments are super important to the relationship between creators and fans on YouTube. You love MyLifeAsEva and Kingsley. You thought that latest video from Tyler was his funniest yet. You want to tell Epic Rap Battles who their next match-up should feature. And these creators want to hear from fans like you, just as much as you want to communicate with them.

All of these conversations should be simpler and easier to have on YouTube, and we’ve been working on that.

First off, we’ve improved the ranking system that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube.

With today’s announcement from Google+, you’ll see more changes. The comments you make on YouTube will now appear only on YouTube, not also on Google+. And vice-versa. This starts rolling out today.

Creators told us they liked the moderation options on their channels, like reviewing comments before they’re posted, blocking certain words, or auto-approving comments from certain fans. All this stays.

Your YouTube channel
This one’s further off. In the coming weeks, YouTube will no longer require a Google+ profile when you want to upload, comment, or create a channel. If you’re happy with everything as it is now, then just keep on keepin’ on. If you want to remove your Google+ profile, you’ll be able to do this in the coming months, but do not do it now or you’ll delete your YouTube channel (no bueno). Please visit our Help Center for further details.

If you watched a YouTube video recently, chances are you did it on your phone or tablet. That’s because today, more than half the views on YouTube happen using mobile devices. So to bring you an even better mobile experience, we’re updating the official YouTube apps – making it easier than ever to find videos you love and create them, too.

The update – available now on Android, mobile web, and soon on iOS – introduces three new tabs:

Home: Easily explore and discover videos you'll love with recommendations based on your watch history as well as playlists personalized just for you.

Subscriptions: Find the latest videos from your favorite channels and creators on the new Subscriptions tab. And to help make sure you never miss an upload, you can now tap the bell icon on the channels you love to get a notification as soon as a new video is posted.

Account: Check out your playlists, watch history, and the videos you’ve uploaded all in one spot.

You can also now watch full-screen vertical videos with just a single tap for the very first time.

But YouTube isn’t just about enjoying videos; it’s a place to express yourself and show the world what you love. With the redesigned app you can take your creativity to new levels using a new set of video creation tools. You’ve got an amazing camera in your phone or tablet, and now you can trim your footage, tint the image with filters, add music, and upload – all inside the app.

These are just a few of the features we’ve been working on, and you’ll see many more later this year.

Over the last 10 years, everyone from moms to presidents have uploaded videos in support of LGBT awareness, to stand up against bullying and discrimination, and to say together, as a community, that marriage equality matters.

That’s why we are so excited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today guaranteeing same-sex couples nationwide the right to marry. In recognition of Pride Month, and of this historic decision, we want to celebrate the many individuals and communities that have helped inspire change:

YouTube has given creators like Tyler Oakley and Jazz Jennings, to entertainers like Ellen DeGeneres and Todrick Hall, a platform to entertain and inspire, while raising LGBT awareness in society as a whole. Thanks to creators and fans alike, YouTube has become a home to coming out videos and transitioning videos, a place where people can share advice, find a community, or encourage activism. Together, these videos help us see our common humanity in the faces and voices of those we might otherwise perceive as different.

So today, we say “thank you” to all of those who were brave enough to show us that it really can, and does, get better—and how much better it still can get.

In the last ten years, we’ve witnessed many of the biggest and most important news stories unfold on YouTube. From the Green Revolution, Arab Spring and protests in Ferguson, to the Charlie Hebdo attacks and earthquake in Nepal, user-generated video has provided a unique and visceral perspective on what’s happening in the world around us. It’s almost impossible to turn on the news during a breaking event without seeing raw video uploaded by a YouTube user somewhere across the globe.

Today, more than 5 million hours of news video is watched on YouTube every day, and the role of the eyewitness has never had a more vital place in the newsgathering process. We live in a world where anyone can bear witness to what is happening around them and share it with a global audience, and YouTube has become a primary home for this powerful, first-person documentary footage.

That is why we’re excited to announce three new initiatives to support the discovery and verification of eyewitness news video on YouTube:

The YouTube Newswire: In partnership with Storyful, a social news agency we’ve worked with since protests broke out in Tahrir Square in 2011, we’re rolling out the YouTube Newswire, a curated feed of the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day, which have been verified by Storyful’s team of editors and are embeddable from the original sources. With the Newswire, we hope to provide journalists with an invaluable resource to discover news video around major events, and to highlight eyewitness video that offers new perspectives on important news stories. The Newswire will feature global and regional feeds that surface the most relevant videos in different parts of the world. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the daily newsletter to get the latest videos delivered directly to your inbox.

The First Draft Coalition: You could say that user-generated news video is today’s “first draft” of capturing an event that took place. But when it comes to incorporating this content into the reporting of a news event, verification is a critical step for any newsroom -- and not every journalist knows where to start. So we’re bringing together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media, and how to consider the ethics of using it in news reporting. This new group, called The First Draft Coalition, will consist of experts from Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful, Bellingcat, First Look Media's Reported.ly, Meedan, Emergent, SAM Desk, and Verification Junkie. The Coalition will develop and program a new site for verification and ethics training, tools, research, and, most importantly, case studies around the biggest news stories of the moment. The site will launch this fall, but in the meantime, check out the Coalition’s Medium collection, chock full of how-to posts and examples of UGC verification, which we’ll update every week. You can also follow First Draft on Twitter.

The WITNESS Media Lab: Over the past decade, YouTube has provided a platform for people to share eyewitness video of human rights atrocities around the world. In partnership with WITNESS, we are supporting the WITNESS Media Lab, a new approach to tackling pressing human rights issues through the analysis of citizen video. The WITNESS Media Lab - in collaboration with innovators in the technology, advocacy and journalism fields - will produce a series of in-depth projects that focus on human rights struggles as seen from the perspective of those who live, witness, and experience them. The first project from the WITNESS Media Lab will explore the impact of bystander video in bringing about justice in police brutality cases in the United States. Check out the new site and follow the WITNESS Media Lab on Twitter for more updates.

We’re proud of the role that YouTube and its creators have and continue to play in the ever-changing, ever-expanding news and information ecosystem, and we hope that these new projects will empower more journalists to use powerful eyewitness video easily and responsibly.

Posted by Olivia Ma, Head of Strategy and Operations, News Lab at Google

As a kid, I spent hours on the living room couch playing video games with friends, taking turns trying to beat Ganon in "Ocarina of Time" and trading Pokémon until I had all 151. Soon controller passing and Game Boy link cables gave way to network multiplayer and PC LAN parties. Eventually, my living room became a virtual one, with a network of gamers sharing experiences and discoveries.

Today, the gaming world is much more diverse than the one I grew up with, and the community has created new formats that have made gaming more collaborative and interactive. On YouTube, gaming has spawned entirely new genres of videos, from let’s plays, walkthroughs, and speedruns to cooking and music videos. Now, it’s our turn to return the favor with something built just for gamers.

This summer, we'll launch YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website to keep you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you, with videos, live streams, and the biggest community of gamers on the web—all in one place.

YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From "Asteroids" to "Zelda," more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.

Keeping up with these games and channels is now super easy, too. Add a game to your collection for quick access whenever you want to check up on the latest videos. Subscribe to a channel, and you'll get a notification as soon as they start a live stream. Uncover new favorites with recommendations based on the games and channels you love. And when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing “call” will show you “Call of Duty” and not “Call Me Maybe.”

Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.

YouTube Gaming will be available this summer, starting in the U.S. and U.K. We’re building this just for gamers—so we want to hear from you about how we can make it the best way to connect with your community. If you’re at E3 next week, come by our booth for an early look at everything we’ve been working on. If not, tune in live from home at youtube.com/e3, head over to gaming.youtube.com and follow us @YouTubeGaming and you’ll be the first to know when YouTube Gaming is ready for you to play with.

We’re now only two weeks away from the start of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, and you can get a front-row seat to the action with YouTube! We're inviting your favorite YouTube creators to show us what's cool and coming up next in the world of gaming, so you can experience every jaw-dropping demo and announcement LIVE.

On Monday, June 15, at 9 a.m. PT, the wall-to-wall coverage will continue with a 12-hour live stream marathon, hosted by Geoff Keighley, brought to you by the movie “Self/less” - in theaters July 10. Geoff and YouTube gaming creators will bring you live coverage of press conferences from publishers like Xbox, Sony, EA and Ubisoft.

The program will include live “Let’s plays” of new titles, plus celebrity interviews along with other video game stars from the YouTube family. You'll also get live coverage from IGN and GameSpot, just like last year.

The play-by-play coverage will continue with hundreds of hours of live and on-demand content throughout the week directly from YouTube’s booth at E3, hosted by RoosterTeeth, along with our legendary Trailer Battle, Nintendo’s Digital Event and Treehouse Live, as well as other exclusive gaming content.

From live reactions and gaming demos, to trivia showdowns and “Meet the Makers” sessions with industry experts, the E3 YouTube hub will offer you the easiest place to explore the best of E3. Stay tuned starting on June 14.

Every adventure starts somewhere, and YouTube’s began on Saturday, April 23, 2005, when "Me at the Zoo" became the first video uploaded to a new site no one had ever heard of. Captured at California's San Diego Zoo, the clip is a 19-second description of what exactly makes elephants so cool. Its brief runtime and casual setup suggest little of the online video craziness that would follow over the subsequent decade.

“Me at the Zoo” proved to be a simple distillation of the premise of a new platform, where anyone could just turn on a camera and broadcast themselves with ease. Who could have predicted that, in that same environment, newgenres, new forms of expression, and new paths to stardom would evolve? That engaging and unique personalities borne of this place could be more influential than Hollywood's biggest names? Or that more than a billion people from all corners of the globe would come together in that space to experience what the world creates, broadcasts, and shares?

For our 10th birthday this month, we've gone from A to Z celebrating the adorable, empowering, awesome, weird and wonderful moments that represent the many sides of YouTube. But, of course, if we're really going to capture 10 years of YouTube, we're going to need to do it in … a video: